Adam & Eve (10 page)

Alone, Adam sank to his knees; he crossed his arms and leaned them against the coarse diamonds of the trunk of a royal palm. He placed his forehead against his crossed forearms and sang aloud part of a hymn he had loved as a boy of six, his family having come into town for church and sociability:

Yet here, in Eden, there was no
we.
No Eve knelt or stood beside him with open hymnal to sing God’s praise. Adam was entirely alone. He stood up, placed the palms of his hands on each side of the rough waist of the palm tree, and squeezed, trembling with intensity, as though he could squeeze her out of the trunk of the tree. If God enjoyed a hymn of praise, He’d no less trouble hearing the silent cry of Adam’s heart. With the brute force of his powerful rancher’s hands, Adam squeezed the tree trunk, scaly as a dragon’s neck, and begged God to send him Eve.

Till it yielded up a dryad, he would strangle the tree trunk.

S
AM
B. H
OUSTON.
That would be Sam Ben Houston, or S. B. Houston, or Son-of-a-Bitch Houston back when he was a drunk. He had celebrated his fortieth birthday with the biggest bender of his life, after which somebody shoveled him into a taxi and sent him to San Antonio General. As he ebbed in and out of consciousness, he could have sworn that his wife came back like a good angel and told him it wasn’t his fault he’d taught her to be a big girl who liked the taste of beer, and it wasn’t his fault the alcohol had eaten the calcium out of her bones and teeth, and their child had had fetal alcohol syndrome and was someone who needed an institution. And it wasn’t his fault about the recreational drugs either or that she had wrecked the car, dead drunk.
Come on to heaven with me,
she whispered, fanning him with her snow-white feathery wings.

That was in the past. That was way before Perpetuity got hold of him and made him into somebody smart and important and damn-near rich, too.

But before Perpetuity, there was AA and Jesus. And that was what saved him after Susan died in the wreck. Almost dead drunk himself, he had stood unbalanced on the edge of a high red rock cliff, and Jesus had grabbed the middle of the back of his belt and pulled him away from the abyss.

These days Sam B. Houston was an expensively dressed businessman who taught Sunday school. He was an expert on the Second Coming, the Rapture, the End of the World, and the last book of the Bible, Revelation. He knew that before Jesus could come again, the Jews must return to their homeland. He was helping to make it come to pass. His church supported Jewish settlers. Mr. Houston had escorted both young Christians and uncommitted teens to the Holy Land to increase their awareness of how little time was left for repentance. While he was there, he had been approached by a Jewish member of Perpetuity.

People were always trying to debunk God’s Word. Treat it like damn literature or tribal history. They’d tried with Jesus; they’d tried to make out like he was a man, like any man. Sex and all. Now the evolutionists were after God the Creator.

As a souvenir, Perpetuity gave Sam Houston the most expensive holster and six-shooter you could darn well imagine.

He was a great shot, too.

There was some sort of papers found in Egypt, and they wanted him to get hold of them. The scientists were out to rewrite Genesis.

In early spring, 2020, back home, Sam Houston sat on a rock far from the city, though he was still wearing his business clothes. He hadn’t had a drink in seven years. It was time for the rattlesnakes to come out and sun themselves. When they did, he’d pop off their heads. Here came two big guys so long they just kept pouring and pouring out of the rock crack. Sam B. squinted his eyes, took aim, and squeezed the trigger.

“Get thee behind me, Satan!” he said, his voice suffused with venom.

Soon they were going to send him to the Holy Land again, or thereabouts.

B
EFORE TAKEOFF
, I put on the ancient leather gloves and a leather bombardier’s jacket with a ratty fur collar left in the Cub—clothes doubtlessly belonging to Pierre Saad. As I flew—over Egypt, eastward over the elbow of the Mediterranean, over Lebanon, and northeast—I rejoiced at being in the pilot’s seat again. My eyes passed fondly over the simple instrumentation as though I were surveying the eyes of trusting children: the tachometer, the pressure and temperature gauges, the altimeter with its two clocklike hands, the airspeed indicator, the bubble compass. While it was too big for me, I was glad to have the antique leather helmet’s protection from the wind. Piloting the Cub was like flying in a sieve.

Twice, since Cairo, I had been able to spot small informal runways as indicated on my flight plan. I had been able to land the plane and refuel without arousing even a murmur of suspicion, but the magical third port indicated in the flight plan refused to appear. I checked the handheld global positioning device for reassurance. When I looked down, all I saw was the shadow of my own small plane as it undulated over the crowns of acacia trees.

Under my plane slid a changing topography, sometimes of undulating green, sometimes a sandy dun flatness. High overhead a tiny jet zipped across
a blue hole in a masklike cloud. Not all the way across. Within the circumference of the eyehole, the glint of silver suddenly burst into a few sharp, red splinters, the way a tiny blood vessel sometimes hemorrhages into the human eye.

There’s death, I thought: death for a pilot beyond the clouds, a man or woman who was as real as I was riding in the cockpit of the ancient Piper Cub. As real as Thom had been.
Igtiyal?
My heart had contorted even before I learned its translation.

Igtiyal?
How could Thom’s death have possibly been murder? If Thom had been murdered, did someone want to murder me, too? The idea was preposterous. Totally harmless, I wasn’t worth murdering. Why swat a bumbling, stumbling bee out of the air?

The warplanes were miles overhead, and they cast no shadows. But exactly where was I? Anxiety would have been a reasonable response to my uncertainty, but instead I felt almost lighthearted—strangely free. Perhaps I didn’t care what happened to me. Since Thom’s death, I had occasionally had such moments of disregard for my own life. It pleased me that Pierre Saad’s Piper Cub was nearly identical to the one in which I had learned to fly. “Fly me back to childhood,” I whispered to it. “Let me try again.”

I had been eleven years old when I called my grandmother on the telephone to ask permission to fly with Mr. Stimson in his latest toy. Sandwiched exactly between his daughters aged ten and twelve, I had been closest friend to both Janet and her younger sister Margarita. Being sandwiched between them alleviated the loneliness of being an only child whose parents were missionaries in Japan.

Their father was a large fleshy man with red hair. Once when he was washing his car, I saw that his milk-white back had been plowed by a big bullet. He had fought in Vietnam. It gave me a rather optimistic view of war: if you came home from it with a big scar on your back, you got to be the fascinating father of the two most wonderful girls in the world.

The first time I came home from school with Janet (we were in the same grade because I had been double-promoted), Mr. Stimson had asked me what my IQ was. Though I knew such questions were considered impolite, I felt flattered that he was curious. When I told him, he remarked admiringly, “You’re even smarter than I am.” I had felt smugly glad (for his sake) that he had the intelligence to look at me with new appreciation. After that I was always welcome at the Stimsons’, and when opportunities for fun came up for the Stimson girls, I was often included. After Mr. Stimson took me up in the Piper Cub, he taught me to fly it.

“Yes,” my grandmother had said, when queried over Cheerios. “It would be good for you to learn to fly. I don’t want you to end up like me.” My grandmother was referring to the fact that she herself had never learned to drive a car. “Who knows what people will need to be able to do in the future?”

When I asked Janet and Margarita if they were excited about learning to fly, they had answered with one voice, “We don’t want to. We’re not going to.”

I could hear their voices again, while I piloted the Piper Cub over the Middle East, as clearly as I could hear my grandmother. Janet had added, “Mother doesn’t want us to.” Over breakfast, my grandmother had only cautioned, “Pay attention and be careful.”

I noted the oil temperature gauge had slightly passed the normal range, 170°F–180°F, but the air over the desert was quite hot, which could account for an abnormal reading.

Biting down on the fingertip of the glove, I pulled my hand free. I wanted to touch my talisman, the metal case of Thom’s memory stick. Fumbling into the leather jacket, from inside my shirt, I retrieved the pendant. As soon as I touched it, I relived how Thom had lowered the black cord over my head that last morning together. How he had remarked on its warmth. It was warm now, from my body. Stroking the smooth metal casing between my thumb and forefinger, I listened to the comforting low hum of the little plane’s engine.
Murder? Thom murdered?
I tightened my whole hand around Thom’s best gift to me. Actually, it still belonged to him. I had just been entrusted with it—like the manuscript. While the codex was a capsule from the past, the flash drive
pointed to the future. Did I hold the location of extraterrestrial life within my hand?

If Thom had been murdered, surely it was my duty to find out why, and by whom? Perpetuity?

The sound of the engine seemed to transpose up a half step. The temperature had passed 200°.

Once again I traced the shape of the memory stick, rounded at both ends and only as long as the last joint of my thumb. In 2017, Thom and I had thought it to be wonderfully miniaturized. Now, only three years later, such devices were only as big as the
nail
of my thumb. “Buttons,” they were called.

Such a strange item. All it could do was remember—but not think.

Thom was dead. All I could do was remember him. What if he had been murdered instead of accidentally killed—so ironically, by a falling piano? Would he be any less dead, if he had been murdered?

The compass reading changed abruptly. Perhaps a magnetic deviation—an iron deposit underground. Far above the Piper Cub, the mask and its empty blue eyeholes had sailed east.

I flew over what may have once been an oil refinery. Now it was a pile of ashes. The rims of seven huge holding tanks had been reduced to rusted curves of cut metal. Then the land beneath became sandy—desertlike, gray and tan.

Below, there was still no sign of a third airport hacked out of the wilderness, though a third airport was noted in my flight plan, and then a change of planes. Below me scrubby grass gave way to a wave of trees.

To go forward, to reclaim my own life, did I need to know? Had Thom been murdered?
Igtiyal?